Book Reviews editorial

The books reviewed in this issue encourage us to extend our feminist thinking and theorizing in key areas of social life and justice. As such, they urge us to rethink, refine, restructure, and reconsider the ways in which we understand and practice feminism so that it is genuinely inclusive and seeks to radically challenge, rather than merely replicates, existing structures of exclusion and oppression. Examining feminist interventions in political theory and in debates around care, punishment, social welfare, motherhood, work, and family relations, our reviewers question what it means to enable all people to live lives free from oppression.

Ira Chadha-Sridhar reviews Caring for Liberalism: Dependency and Liberal Political Theory, edited by Asha Bhandary and Amy R. Baehr. This book takes as its starting point the feminist argument that human beings are dependent on one another for care, but that “this fact, and the corresponding need for care arrangements in any just socio-political order, have not been dealt with adequately by liberal philosophers.” In response, contributors to the volume engage with and reinterpret key liberal thinkers and develop forms of liberalism that can accommodate dependency. In her review, Chadha-Sridhar highlights the “rigor and clarity” of the theoretical interventions made in the book and notes the importance of the dialogues with mainstream liberalism that it opens up. However, she questions whether these theoretical engagements can fully resolve some of the most pressing problems of liberal thought, from a feminist perspective: “its arguably misguided emphasis on individualism, the gendered constructions of the private and public spheres that often prevail within liberalism, and the ‘whiteness of liberalism’ that the editors of the volume point to as a pervasive problem.”

In reviewing Anarchafeminism by Chiara Bottici, Mariella Werner similarly highlights the value of feminist interventions into political theory, this time focusing upon “the nexus between anarchism and feminism.” As Werner explains, for Bottici, feminism needs to be embedded in a form of anarchism if it is to move beyond a theory for the privileged few and not further incite the oppression of others. There is something unique about the oppression of women, Bottici contends, but it needs to be understood within the entanglement of all other forms of oppression. To do so, Werner’s review explores Bottici’s feminist conceptualization of transindividuality, which can construct women’s bodies as ongoing processes, capable of “being situated outside the hetero- and cisnormative framework.”

The ways in which gender intersects with other aspects of identity within existing patriarchal structures is also the theme of Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie. The authors argue that carceral responses to crime – prisons – are not effective in creating security for people but rather institutionalize racist, classist, sexist, and colonial state violence. Therefore, the authors argue, feminism and abolitionism are inseparable in the pursuit of a world free of violence. In her review, Aishwarya Bhuta describes the book as a “clarion call” to fundamentally rethink the idea of punishment. She highlights its critique of mainstream feminist mobilization against gendered violence, which has too often relied on and reinforced policing and carceral institutions that perpetuate violence and harm against minorities and marginalized groups. Instead, the book highlights examples of abolitionist feminist grassroots mobilization across the world, thereby exposing the linkages between state and interpersonal violence and propagating alternative responses to violence in all of its forms.

Ruth Phillips’ Practising Feminism for Social Welfare: A Global Perspective, reviewed by Rahma Isna Saidah and Marina Rospitasari, similarly seeks to rethink feminism in inclusive ways within the global social welfare setting. Rather than advocating a single feminist theoretical approach, this book explores the value of a range of feminist thinking that can be embedded in feminist practice. Investigating issues including motherhood and reproductive rights, domestic violence, and aging within a context of globalization and social justice, Phillips argues that feminist thinking must be central to any praxis for positive change. However, the reviewers note that “in countries that preserve a patriarchal culture through religious ideologies, traditions, nationalism, and social rules,” feminist activism is not straightforward. They observe that “the book still leaves questions regarding the specific strategies that can be employed to challenge rules and promote collective awareness about gender equality.”

Finally, Shani Orgad’s Heading Home: Motherhood, Work and the Failed Promise of Equality explores the intersections between gender and other axes of inequality through a focus on highly educated, middle-class women who have chosen to give up paid employment to become stay-at-home mothers. Seeking to make sense of these women’s choices and understand their lives, this book illustrates the complexity of power relations, agency, and “choice.” As Varsha Gopal points out in her review, Orgad shows that “oppression and privilege need not be mutually exclusive; while their class position privileges the women in her study in a multitude of ways, gender relations retain their oppressive nature.” Gopal commends the book’s careful, empathic analysis of how the women grapple with the disjunction between the ideal of the “balanced woman” successfully managing career and family life, on the one hand, and their own lived realities, on the other. However, while the book aims to incite rage and resistance in women, Gopal argues that it falls short of arriving at suggestions for structural or policy change that could make “the promise of equality” more real.

Together, these reviews demonstrate that feminist theorizing and praxis – and the ambition to live feminist lives – is a dynamic process that requires constant refinement, attention, and agility.

In the Book Reviews section, we focus on books that explore feminist politics and gender relations in a global frame. We aim to include multi-disciplinary, cross-border, and critical feminist scholarship. The section includes three types of contributions: book reviews, review essays, and essays that rethink the canon of feminist scholarship. Book reviews engage with an individual, recently published piece of work, briefly describing its content and critically evaluating and locating its contributions to global feminist scholarship and to particular bodies of literature. Review essays discuss several texts on the same theme and bring them into conversation with each other, aiming either to explore a recent debate or emerging research field that has generated a range of new publications, or to survey the best of the literature covering a more established area of research. Essays that rethink the canon aim to re-evaluate the canon of feminist global political scholarship and its boundaries, and provide the opportunity to also engage with books that are not recently published. These essays may aim to critically rethink the established literature on a particular topic in light of recent events or new publications, or to engage with books that have been marginalized by existing disciplinary boundaries and explain why these ought to be essential reading for feminists working on global issues.

If you are interested in submitting a review essay or a review, please contact the Book Reviews Editors, Elisabeth Olivius, Ebru Demir, and Katrina Lee-Koo. Reviews and essays need to be written in English, but the texts they review do not.

For further information, please refer to the journal’s FAQ page at https://www.ifjpglobal.org/submit-to-us/#anchor_book_reviews_shortcut.